Greetings, members.
The University of Waterloo Computer Science Club hereby cordially
invites you to attend a talk by Herb Sutter on the topics of Machine
Architecture, Performance, and Scalability. Herb's talk will be held on
Thursday, February 28th at 4:30 PM in DC 1302.
An abstract:
Machine Architecture, Performance, and Scalability: Things Your
Programming Language Never Told You.
High-level languages insulate the programmer from the machine. That's a
wonderful thing -- except when it obscures the answers to the
fundamental questions of "What does the program do?" and "How much does
it cost?"
The C++ and C# programmer is less insulated than most, and still we find
that programmers are consistently surprised at what simple code actually
does and how expensive it can be -- not because of any complexity of a
language, but because of being unaware of the complexity of the machine
on which the program actually runs.
This talk examines the "real meanings" and "true costs" of the code we
write and run, especially on commodity and server systems, by delving
into the performance effects of bandwidth vs. latency limitations, the
ever-deepening memory hierarchy, the changing costs arising from the
hardware concurrency explosion, memory model effects all the way from
the compiler to the CPU to the chipset to the cache, and more -- and
what you can do about them.
----
Herb Sutter is an influential authority on software development using
C++ and concurrency. He is the best selling author of Exceptional C++
and three other books, along with hundreds of technical papers and
articles including the widely-cited essay "The Free Lunch Is Over" which
described the software sea change now in progress to exploit
increasingly parallel hardware. He is chair of the ISO C++ standards
committee and chief native languages architect at Microsoft.
If you have received this message twice, we apologise.
Cheers,
Calum T. Dalek
Chairbeing Extraordinaire
Computer Science Club
University of Waterloo
Greetings programs,
The CSC will be having scheduled downtime on the following hosts starting
Sunday, February 3rd, 12PM:
- ginseng
- mail
Services affected will be the following:
- member home directories
- club hosting
- mail delivery (SMTP)
As part of our continued expansion of service, we have recently acquired
network storage device, and will be migrating user home directories to this
device. This will allow us to host more concurrent users (both members and
clubs), in addition to supporting snapshots of user home directories to
facilitate backup capabilities.
We are aware of the importance of having high service availability to not
only our members, but to the organizations whose websites we host as well.
As such, we have decided to make your data _read-only_ but still accessible
during the course of migration. This means that while you will still be able
to log in, you will be _unable_ to make any modifications to your files
during this time period. This also means that any mail you may normally
receive will be _delayed_ by up to 24 hours. It is also important to also
note that database services will still be accessible during the course of
the migration.
We have allotted 24 hours for the process of migration. We expect all
services to be up by Monday, February 4th, 12PM.
To help us ensure a smooth migration, we ask that you please end any
long-running jobs that write to files in your home directory. We cannot make
any guarantees that these jobs will perform correctly during the migration.
Cheers,
Systems Committee
